Mencyclopaedia: Lou Dalton

A skilled home-grown designer whose star is rising.

BY Luke Leitch |
22 March 2013

Lou Dalton Photo: LOU DALTON

London Collections: Men (the awkwardly named chaps' fashion week) has sparked consternation in Milan, Florence and Paris as it continues to seduce big-name fashion brands to Britain. Burberry, which for years has shown its collection in Italy, is the latest company to return to home turf - and at least two other major menswear forces are preparing to present their latest designs here too.

Related articles

Yet the list of those who have always shown in London is extremely impressive, too. Oliver Spencer (previously Mencyclopaedia'd) and Margaret Howell (to come) have both built thriving businesses from a British base. And now Lou Dalton, the designer whose show has opened London Collections: Men since it started two seasons ago, seem set to follow them.

Dalton, along with Howell, is one of the very few female designers of men's clothes. She established her label in 2005, and presents whimsically themed, beautifully made collections. This summer's is heavy on cycling kit references - lots of mesh and shorts, thankfully not always combined - as well as baseball shirts, panelled tailoring and a particularly fetching plum-toned mac. A nine-piece, all-black selection of it has just been ''installed'' by Dalton at Dover Street Market - a London store whose stock is a reliable litmus of what the ultra-fashion conscious are conscious of - along with a moodboard of her references that includes Taxi Driver and the 1970s cycling film Breaking Away. She says that sales are already up 50 per cent on last season, with particular demand coming from Japan, and adds: "I grew up in a house where we were told we could do anything we wanted if we worked for it. And now something I've been dreaming of for years feels like it's really happening at last."

Dalton, now 40, grew up in Hodnet, Shropshire, and left school at 16 to apprentice as a pattern cutter to Pardie, a tailoring business in Market Drayton. Here she helped Pardie's owner, Arthur Pardington, fulfil orders for traditional English country wear, many of them for local farmers.

One client was Purdey, the gunmaker, which would direct its burlier customers on the hunt for shooting breeches and jackets to Pardington. Inspired when she was 12 after seeing an episode of This Is Your Life starring Zandra Rhodes, Dalton dreamed of becoming a fashion designer as she learnt the nuts and bolts of clothes-making. Aged 19, she went to study fashion at the Royal College of Art, and graduated in 1998. Following a stint in Milan on design teams that produced collections for houses including Iceberg and Stone Island, she returned to Britain and worked for companies including United Arrows, an excellent but sadly unavailable-here Japanese label.

Nine years ago, while in Shetland developing her knitwear collection, she met her partner Justin - a chemical engineer for BP - who both backs her self-funded label and inspires it. His work uniform - a boiler suit - along with the film Local Hero, were two of the references mined by Dalton for next autumn's collection.

Both charming and skilled - thanks to that apprenticeship Dalton is one of surprisingly small group of designers who can make the clothes as well as dream them up on paper - Dalton is a designer who might never have mass appeal (she seems too aesthetically quirky for that) yet none the less seems poised to develop her This Is Your Life fantasy into a real commercial success.